[mythtv-users] Disk space for frontend-only machine
Adrian Saul
sgtbundy at gmail.com
Fri Aug 17 12:35:04 UTC 2012
On 17/08/2012 4:09 PM, Phill Edwards wrote:
> I've never tried setting up a network boot. Isn't it slow to boot? If
> you have to transfer a few GBs of data for the MythTV frontend image
> doesn't that take a long time (even over a gigabit network it's going
> to take some time to transfer all that data)?
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You don't have to copy the entire thing - the boot block and a miniroot
via TFTP, then once it mounts the NFS image it opens files as needed.
You also get some benefits of your NFS server doing caching as well as
your client machine.
I actually have my home setup running like this with a Solaris server at
the back doing the storage (this lets me ZFS snapshot the image around
upgrades etc). My backend/frontend and a standalone frontend are both
network boot. Performance wise its fine, the NFS benchmark I have got
is 100MB/s read and a little slower for write - I also have the database
on the NFS server so I can snapshot it as well and so its isolated from
the upgrade process. The noticeable impact is latency around file
attributes or copying lots of small files, that tends to be a lot
slower. Doing things like release upgrades tends to be a lot longer
than off disk. In my setup I also suspect some Solaris vs Linux NFS
issues at play, but for the most part it just works and forcing things
to NFSv3 seems to help.
Over the last two nights I have actually worked to upgrade my current
setup from Mythbuntu 11.04 + 0.25.2 to 12.04 + 0.26. What I did was
use VirtualBox to to build the new backend and frontend images clean
from ISO. I did some tweaking to add extra packages and some known
config, then copied it over to my NFS server using rsync. I then set
that up as a new boot image and booted the machines off the new image -
bang - upgraded, with the old image there as a rollback if need be.
Actually I did spend several hours after that sorting out various
database, 0.26 and missing config issues, but thats all part of
documenting the process for next time.
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